The Tailor of Panama (22 page)

So instead they rode in the four-track to Anytime, which was a house without walls perched like a wooden bandstand on its own round hazy island sixty yards across, in a vast sweltering flooded valley called Lake Gatún, twenty miles inland from the Atlantic at the summit of the Canal's course, which is marked by a curling avenue of coloured buoys disappearing in pairs into the dripping haze. The island lay at the lake's western edge in a jigsaw of steaming jungle bays and inlets and mangrove swamps and other islands, of which Barro Colorado was the largest, and the least significant was Anytime, so named by the Pendel children after Paddington Bear's marmalade and rented by Louisa's father from his employers for a few forgotten dollars every year and now bequeathed to her in charity.

The Canal smouldered to the left of them, and the mist coiled over it like an eternal dew. Pelicans dived through the mist and the
air inside the car smelled of ship's oil and nothing in the world had changed or ever would, Amen. The same boats that had passed here when Louisa was Hannah's age passed now, the same black figures propped their bare elbows on the sweating railings, the same wet flags drooped from their masts and nobody in the world knew what they meant—her father used to joke—except for one blind old pirate in Portobelo. Pendel, strangely ill at ease in Mr. Osnard's presence, drove in sulky silence. Louisa lounged beside him, which was what Mr. Osnard had insisted upon; he swore he preferred it in the back.

Mr. Osnard,
she repeated drowsily to herself.
Portly
Mr. Osnard. Ten years my junior at least, yet I'll
never
be able to call you Andy. She had forgotten, if she had ever known, how disarmingly polite an English gentleman could be when he put his insincere mind to it. Humour and politeness together, her mother used to warn her, make a dangerous heap of charm. So does being a good listener, Louisa reflected as she lay with her head back, smiling at the way Hannah pointed out the sights to him as if she owned them, and Mark letting her because it was her birthday—and besides, Mark in his way was quite as besotted by their guest as Hannah was.

One of the old lighthouses came into sight.

“Now why would
anybody
be such a silly ass as to paint a lighthouse
black
on one side and
white
on t'other,” Mr. Osnard asked, having listened endlessly to Hannah on the horrendous appetite of alligators.

“Hannah, you're to be respectful to Mr. Osnard now,” Louisa warned when Hannah hooted and told him he was a lemon.

“Tell her about old Braithwaite, Andy,” Harry suggested grudgingly. “Tell her your childhood memories of him. She'd like that.”

He's showing him off to me, she thought. Why's he doing that?

But already she was slipping back into the mists of her own childhood, which was what she did whenever they drove to Anytime, an out-of-body experience: back into the deadly predictability of Zonian life from day to day, into the crematorium sweetness bequeathed to us by our dreaming forefathers, nothing left for us to do but drift
amid the all-year-round flowers that the Company grows for us and the always-green lawns that the Company mows for us, and swim in the Company pools and hate our beautiful sisters and read the Company newspapers and fantasise about being a perfected society of early American socialists, part settlers, part colonisers, part preachers to the godless natives in the World Beyond the Zone, while never actually rising above our own petty arguments and jealousies, which are the lot of any foreign garrison, never questioning the Company's assumptions, whether ethnic, sexual or social, never presuming to step outside the confinement allotted to us, but progressing obediently and inexorably, level by level, up and down the tideless narrow avenue of our preordained rut in life, knowing that every lock and lake and gully, every tunnel, robot, dam, and every shaped and ordered hill on either side of them is the immutable achievement of the dead, and that our bounden duty here on earth is to praise God and the Company, steer a straight line between the walls, cultivate our faith and chastity in defiance of our promiscuous sister, masturbate ourselves to death and polish the brass on the Eighth Wonder of Its Day.

Who gets the houses, Louisa?
Who gets the land, swimming pools and tennis courts and hand-clipped hedges and plastic Christmas reindeer, courtesy of the Company?
Louisa, Louisa, tell us how to raise revenue, cut costs, milk the gringos' sacred cow!
We want it
now,
Louisa!
Now
while we're in power,
now
while the foreign bidders are courting us,
now
before those dewy-eyed ecologists start preaching at us about their precious rain forests.

Whisperings of payoffs, manoeuvrings, secret deals, echoing down the corridors. The Canal will be modernised, widened to accommodate bigger shipping . . . they are planning new locks . . . multinational contractors are offering huge sums for consultancy, influence, commissions, contracts . . . And meanwhile: new files Louisa isn't allowed to handle and new bosses who stop talking when she walks into any room except Delgado's: her poor, decent,
honourable Ernesto with his broom, vainly sweeping at the tide of their insatiable greed.

“I'm too damn
young
!” she yelled. “I'm too
young
and too
alive
to see my childhood trashed before my eyes!”

She sat up with a jump. Her head must have rolled onto Pendel's uncollaborative shoulder.

“What did I say?” she demanded anxiously.

She had said nothing. It was diplomatic Mr. Osnard from the back who had spoken. In his infinite politeness, he was enquiring whether Louisa enjoyed watching the Panamanians taking over the Canal.

In Gamboa harbour, Mark showed Mr. Osnard how you got the tarpaulin off the motorboat and started the engine all by yourself. Harry took the helm long enough to navigate the wake of the Canal traffic, but it was Mark who beached the boat and made it fast, unloaded the luggage and, with a lot of help from jolly Mr. Osnard, lit the barbecue.

Who is this glossy young man, so young, so handsome-ugly, so sensual, so amusing, so polite? What is this sensual man to my husband, and what is my husband to him? Why is this sensual man like a new life for us—although Harry, having foisted him on us, seems to wish he never had? How come he knows so much about us, is so at ease with us, so family, talks so knowledgeably about the shop and Marta and Abraxas and Delgado and all the people in our lives, just because his father was a friend of Mr. Braithwaite?

Why do I like him so much better than Harry does? He's Harry's friend, not mine. Why are my children all over him, while Harry scowls and keeps his back turned and refuses to laugh at Mr. Osnard's many jokes?

Her first thought was that Harry was jealous, and that pleased her. Her second thought was at once a nightmare and a terrible, shameful exultation:
Oh Jesus, oh mother and father, Harry wants me to fall in love with Mr. Osnard so that we're even.

Pendel and Hannah cooking spareribs. Mark preparing fishing rods. Louisa handing out beer and apple juice and watching her childhood chug away between the buoys. Mr. Osnard asking her about Panamanian students—did she know any, were they militant?—and about people who lived the other side of the bridge.

“Well, we do have the rice farm,” says Louisa winsomely. “But I don't think we know any
people
there!”

Harry and Mark sitting back-to-back on the boat. The fish, to quote Mr. Osnard, giving themselves up in a spirit of voluntary euthanasia. Hannah lying on her tummy in the shade of the Anytime house, ostentatiously turning the expensive pages of the book on ponies that Mr. Osnard has brought her for her birthday. And Louisa, under the influence of his gentle prompting and a secretive slug of vodka, regaling him with the story of her life this far, in the flirtatious language of her whore-sister Emily when she did her Scarlett O'Hara number before falling on her back:

“My problem—and I have to say this—is it
really
okay if I call you Andy? I'm Lou—though I love him dearly in
so
many ways, my problem—and thank God I only have the one, because almost every girl I
know
in Panama has a problem for every day of the
week—
my problem
has
to be my father.”

10

Louisa prepared her husband for his pilgrimage to the General in the same way that she got the children ready for Bible school, but with even more enthusiasm. Patches of attractive colour in her cheeks. Speaking with the greatest animation. A good deal of her enthusiasm taken from a bottle.

“Harry, we must wash the four-track. You are about to dress a modern living hero. The General has more medals for his rank and age than any general in the U.S. Army. Mark, I want you to carry the buckets of hot water. Hannah, you will please take charge of the sponge and detergent, and quit cursing
now
.”

Pendel could have run the four-track through the automatic car wash at the local garage, but Louisa needed godliness for the General today as well as cleanliness. She had never been so proud to be American. She said so repeatedly. She was so excited she tripped and almost fell. When they had cleaned the four-track, she checked Pendel's tie. Checked it the way Auntie Ruth checked Benny's ties. Close to, then from a distance, like a painting. And she wasn't satisfied till he'd changed it for something quieter. Her breath smelled strongly of toothpaste. Pendel wondered why she cleaned her teeth so much these days.

“Harry, you are not so far as I know a co-respondent. It is therefore not appropriate that you
resemble
a co-respondent when you visit the United States General in charge of Southern Command.” Then in her best Ernie Delgado secretarial voice she rang the hairdresser for a
ten o'clock appointment. “No bulges and no sideburns, thank you, José. Mr. Pendel will want it very short and tidy today. He is calling on the United States General in charge of Southern Command.”

After that she told Pendel who to be:

“Harry, you will not make jokes, you will be respectful”—fondly pressing down the shoulders of his jacket, though they were perfect as they lay—“and you will give the General my regards, and you will be sure to tell him that
all
the Pendels and not just Milton Jenning's daughter are looking forward to the American Families' Thanksgiving Barbecue and Fireworks Display, the same as every year. And before you leave the shop you give those shoes another polish now. There wasn't a soldier born who didn't judge a man by his shoes, and the General in charge of Southern Command is no exception. Drive very carefully, Harry. I mean it.”

Her strictures were unnecessary. Ascending the zigzag jungle road up Ancón Hill, Pendel as usual meticulously observed the speed restrictions. At the U.S. Army checkpoint he stiffened up and pulled a gritty smile for the sentry, for by then he was halfway to being a soldier himself. Passing the groomed white villas he observed how the stencilled ranks of the occupants rose with him, and experienced a vicarious promotion on his way to heaven. And as he walked up the noble steps to the front door of Number One Quarry Heights he assumed, despite his suitcase, the peculiar American military gait that keeps the upper body on a stately course while hips and knees perform their independent functions.

But from the moment he stepped inside the house, Harry Pendel was, as always when he came here, hopelessly in love.

This was not power. This was power's prize: a proconsul's palace on a conquered foreign hill, manned by courteous Roman guards.

“Sir. The General will see you now, sir,” the sergeant informed him, depriving him of his suitcase in a single trained movement.

The glistening white hall was hung with brass plates for every general who had served here. Pendel greeted them like old friends
even while he cast round nervously for unwelcome signs of change. He need not have feared. Some unfortunate glazing of the verandah, some unsightly air conditioners. A few too many carpets. The General at an earlier stage in his career had subdued the Orient. Otherwise the house was much as Teddy Roosevelt might have found it when he came to inspect the progress of the moon shot of its day. Weightless, his own existence irrelevant, Pendel followed the sergeant through connecting halls, drawing rooms, libraries and parlours. Each window was a separate world for him: now the Canal, laden with shipping, winding grandly through the valley basin; now the layered mauve hills of forest, draped with fever mist; now the arches of the Bridge of the Americas bounding like the toils of a great sea monster across the bay, and the three far conical islands suspended from the sky.

And the birds! The animals! On this very hill—Pendel had learned from one of Louisa's father's books—more breeds existed than in all of Europe put together. In the branches of one great oak tree, full-grown iguanas basked and pondered in the midmorning sun. From another, brown-and-white marmosets came spinning down a pole to grab themselves a bit of mango put there by the General's jolly wife. Then up the pole again, hand over hand, trampling each other for the hell of it as they scampered back to safety. And on the perfect lawn, brown
ñeques
like great hamsters loped about their business. It was yet another house where Pendel had always wanted to live.

The sergeant was mounting the stairs, bearing Pendel's suitcase at the port. Pendel followed him. Old prints of warriors in uniform brandishing their moustaches at him. Recruitment posters demanding his involvement in forgotten wars. In the General's study, a teak desk so brightly polished that Pendel swore he could see clean through it. But the summit of Pendel's levitation was the dressing room. Ninety years ago the finest American architectural and military minds had joined forces to create Panama's first sartorial shrine. In those days the
tropics were not kind to gentlemen's clothes. The best-cut suits could gather mildew in a night. To confine them in small spaces compounded the humidity. Therefore the inventors of the General's dressing room devised, in place of wardrobes, a tall and airy chapel with upper windows ingeniously positioned to catch each passing breeze. And within it they worked their magic in the form of a great mahogany bar slung from pulleys to raise it to the apex or lower it to ground level. The lightest touch of woman was enough. And to the bar they attached the many day suits, morning coats, dinner jackets, tail suits, ceremonial and dress uniforms of the first general to command the Heights. So that they might hang free and rotate, wafted by zephyrs captured by the windows. In the whole world Pendel knew no more rousing tribute to his art than this.